Ellen Ann Willmott who spent all her huge fortune on plants and a passionate gardener

Warley Place Essex the site of Ellen's wonderful garden

Ellen's first book, Warley Garden in Spring and Summer, appeared in 1909, with still more wonders revealed: imagine a walled garden with paved paths winding through drifts of lilies, primula, delphiniums and verbascum spires, the pavings nestling in carpets of pinks and saxifrages, and hundreds of rare alpine flowers. The rocky valley of miniature ravines that Backhouse and his sons had built now flowered in a crazy-geographer's world - alpines side by side with plants from New Zealand, those of the Andes sheltering others from Greenland, Kashmir next to California, the Cordilleras and the heights of Pamir. Everything was immaculately labelled and, though hectic geographically, the arrangements allowed just those comparisons that horticulturists and botanists loved to experience. But Ellen's latest and strongest passion was a very English one, for roses - the nurseryman Correvon judged her collection, needless to say, one of the best in Britain, and she grew them at La Boccanegra as well. But trajedy struck Ellen Wilmott lost all her money and with it the wonderful garden.Warley Place and her belongings that remained were put up for auction; after another war the buildings were gutted, and though the park and gardens remained in private ownership, they were leased to Essex Naturalists' Trust as a nature reserve, surely the final ignominy for a garden. Nature has resumed control, with a wilderness of obtuseness and poignancy that it is hard to evaluate: It is now a triple SI - a site of special scientific interest - but not, I imagine, for Miss Willmott's ghosts. The waves of blue and gold, of crocuses, scilla, aconites and narcissi still sweep back each spring, many of her fine trees must survive in the anonymity of the tangled woodland, and the rocky ravine of millstone grit that Backhouse built for her first Warley enterprise still sparkles with water and the vivid emeralds of ferns and lichens. For the rest, I can best ask you to imagine Kew Gardens, the day after the end of the world.Taken from an article in the Independent by Jane Brown